


to sing through the storm

by Shadaras



Category: Original Work
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Merpeople, POV Second Person, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 16:11:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20951228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadaras/pseuds/Shadaras
Summary: The first thing you learn is how to breathe.





	to sing through the storm

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Silex](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/gifts).

1.

The first thing you learn is how to breathe.

It isn’t easy. Your lungs are designed for smooth air, not for filtration. The first month, you choke and gasp more often than not, thick seawater sliding through your mouth and not yet splitting into safe water and unneeded salt and useful air. Instead, it all sits heavy in your body, sloshing against the tides as your new family whistles and murmurs around you, soft-scaled hands petting and pressing and helping your body learn what it needs and what it must remove.

You are never wholly like them, your wide-eyed sea-sisters, but you are more like them than the earth-side parents who birthed you, by the time they finish tending to you. Your eyes are covered with a thick film. Your throat opens to the sea, thin slits letting out anything you have no need of, a netted flap letting air into your lungs and pure water into your stomach. Your skin roughens and stretches down your elongated fingers, letting you glide through the water almost as well as your new kin.

The reefs protect you, provide you with color and life and places to hide—though not as well as your small spotted littermates. The rock-brown elders, their arms as long as your child-body, float benignly through the deeper waters, watching you at play as you learn which corals are too sharp for your thin skin and which anemones are edible and which sting you too much to be worth the risk. They feed you when you cannot feed yourself, soothe your wounds, mediate arguments your child-selfs do not understand how to do anything other than repeat grievances in louder and sharper ways.

Your childhood is good.

Your childhood is strange.

You don’t know what it would have been like, on land.

2.

You see ships in the distance, sometimes.

When you ask, the elders tell you that you came from one. They show you its ruins, broken upon the storm-wracked rocks that protect your reef. It is small, and they say it was desperate, and that no other humans (the legged folk you no longer quite are) survived. You believe them. You keep staring at the ships you see on the horizon, because they do not seem either small or desperate. They lumber, confident whales slowly swimming above the waves, angelfish-vivid colors shining brighter than anything else in the sky.

You tell your litter-mates about how you dream of them, sometimes. They are as large as you now, and not yet done growing, but you have been stuck at the same size for the last turning of the season, and the elders say you are as large as the other humans they’ve seen, so you are unlikely to become any bigger. You accept this, but as your litter-mates keep growing, you wish—

You don’t know what you wish.

You wish to be like them, to have dorsal fins on your back, and a thick finned tail instead of legs. Your skin is just as rich a brown as any of theirs, at least, and your eyes are the same soothing dark. Their teeth are larger and sharper, and their fingers are thick and webbed and not as clever as yours. They sing to each other, and your tongue is always clumsy on the words, though you can understand all that they say.

But you also wish to see the human-ships, to understand their pods and learn their speech. You know you spoke it once, at least a little; in your dreams a soft-mouthed woman with long thin hair sings to you, and when you are very lucky you almost remember what the song means. Except it is not lucky, because when you do, you wake with a yearning, and go watch the ships, letting your skin dry out until you are salt-spotted and your lungs are smooth in the wind.

You were like them once.

You think you may still be.

3.

In the end, they come to you.

The storm drives them, dark and lashing, lightning breaking the sky open to show you triangles of black sails. Your litter-mates hide, and your elders half-heartedly try to hold you back, but they have known this was coming; you have been speaking of this desire for too many years. You stand on the farthest rocks, rain whipping around you, and sing above the storm in a way no human can, because you are no longer wholly human.

The ship hears you. The ship turns towards you. The ship comes, and a lantern tries to cut through the night. You reach out as they reach down, and they pull you up on a rope that feels more familiar than anything else, the same combination of rough-slick that your elders’ skin sometimes is. They pull you up, hands so soft you almost don’t recognise them, bodies covered by skin that isn’t theirs, mouths moving in sounds that you almost once understood. 

You shake your head, and one of them wraps you in a soft wet skin, and another helps you stand on the rocking wood, and a third leads you deeper into the ship. You hear the elders sing something behind you, low and mournful and something these humans could never understand. It is not a goodbye, not exactly; it is the song of travel, a song for those who may never return but will be loved and welcomed if they do. You turn, and call out a high piercing note. The humans flinch away from you, and hasten to bring you into their strange dry shelter called a ship.

They dry you off, clumsy and uncertain. They don’t like your gills. They look at your face and then away, though they stare into each others’ eyes an unsettling amount. They hold your hands and fingers and prod at the webbing, and say more things, loud and upset, when they see your feet.

Still, they keep you with them.

Still, they slowly teach you their tongue.

4.

You sail better than any human can.

The pirate crew that took you onboard loves you. They call you Mira, after their word for the ocean, and they learn your sea-songs and teach you their own. The skin on your hands and feet grow rough and thick as you work with them, and you learn how to dress yourself in loose clothes you can shed easily when you dive back into the sea that you never truly leave. You do not forget how to breathe the ocean, nor do you forget how to speak to the merfolk you sometimes hear on the horizon, though their songs are not your own.

When the pirates fight, so do you, because you are one of them now, these strange seafarers who apologise for flinching at your differences upon first meeting. They are different, too, from the land-dwellers they were born from: They do not know the secrets of survival in the water, yet they choose to live upon it in _Mahi_, their terribly fragile (and surprisingly strong) vessel that rides above the waves. They do not fear the sea; they love it, they are in awe of it, they respect it.

The captain is named Neha, and she is a woman with skin darker than your own and hair the color of storms. She calls you _daughter_ and whispers to you _Mahi_’s secrets. You learn which creaks warn of storms, and how to cut the sails to ride the winds. Neha teaches you to read the stars, and you learn that you see more stars than she—or any of the crew—is able to. The same things that let your eyes see so clearly in the water lets you see the myriad colors of the stars, and you spend nights in the crow’s nest telling your crewmates about the constellations they have never known.

You learn, and you sail, and you fall in love.

But you do not forget your first home.

5.

_Mahi_ is yours now.

Neha retired, and left her to you, and the rest of the crew agreed. You are captain now, and the first thing you do, as you stand barefoot in front of your human family, is long to go _home_. You know how to find home; you don’t think you could forget, because the currents and stars are in your blood. You were born there in every way that matters, and your body shaped itself to those reefs. You know the name the humans use for it, but in your heart it is always and only a soft hush and trill that means _home_.

So you set out, coiling around peninsulas and wrapping around islands and weaving between rocky outcroppings, faster than you’ve been allowed to sail _Mahi_ before. Your crew whoops and laughs behind you, moving like extensions of you as you shout above the wind and waves and your voice cuts into their hearts. They trim the sails and they heave the rudder and you stand at the wheel, eyes fixed on an invisible point of the horizon, your heart beating faster as you sail home.

It takes months, because Neha’s wife lived on the other side of the continent’s point, but you don’t care and your crew follows where you lead. The solstice comes and goes, and it is with the monsoons that you arrive home, just as it was when you left. You sing out into the storm, and your crew hums and whistles along, harmonizing and lifting your heart. Their voices are lost to the rain, but your family still hears you, and you hear your litter-mates and new young voices that must be their children, and a few elders still alive.

You anchor _Mahi_ at the reef’s edge and settle in to wait out the storm.

Soon, you will bring your families together, and your heart will truly be whole.


End file.
